Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [140]
Taft, on the Republican right, took what had become the obligatory stance among all candidates of opposition to special privilege and monopoly. He could justifiably boast of Attorney General Wickersham’s strong record as a trust-buster. Like Wilson, he called for more prosecutorial powers, and like the Progressive moonbeamers restrained by George Perkins, clearer definitions of acts that might be criminalized as monopolistic. This was as far as the GOP platform enabled Taft to go in appealing to popular reform sentiment. The rest of the document amounted to a virtual reprint of its predecessors in 1908 and 1904, but purged of progressive values.
AT THE BEGINNING of September, Roosevelt set out from New York with a herd of small silver bull mooses in his luggage, to give away to children. He intended to barnstorm for a month, from New England to the far Northwest, continuing via California, the Rockies, and the breadbasket states deep into Dixie. By the time he got home via the mid-Atlantic seaboard, he would have covered nine thousand miles, and become the first presidential campaigner ever to encircle the country.
Ray Stannard Baker caught an early glimpse of him at a depot in Hartford, Connecticut, addressing a large crowd in the rain. “He looked, as usual, as hard as a maple knot—and seemed to be enjoying himself.” But Baker, now one of Wilson’s keenest supporters, thought the Colonel was beginning to show signs of demagoguery, with bizarre proposals to emulate the authoritarian agricultural policies of Germany and Denmark, and to use American schoolhouses as political forums. “He is a dangerous man who makes the people feel intensely without making them think clearly.”
Even in miserable weather, Roosevelt radiated conviviality—so much so that rumors again circulated that he was on the bottle. He had been drunk at Osawatomie, befuddled at the Ohio constitutional convention, and soused at Armageddon. A citizen of Butte, Montana, assured one of the reporters on his train that the Colonel had been seen knocking back fourteen highballs in fifteen minutes.
The reporter did not file this story, but Roosevelt heard about it and asked his campaign team to watch out for a clear case of published libel.
Although there were a few stretches of Democratic territory that received him coldly, most of the crowds greeting him were large. Official welcomers climbed aboard at every minor depot, sure that he was as thrilled as they were to see the band, bemedaled veterans, and babes in arms on the platform. Their salutations became so predictable that scribes in the press car developed a convenient code for wire dispatch, “GXLC.”*
Some outdoor audiences spread so far in all directions that Roosevelt had to project his remarks at them section by section. “Friends,” he yelled to a mob of twenty-five thousand at the Minnesota State Fair, “this is the only time I ever wished I could face two ways at once—or even five ways at once, but I’d have to be built like a starfish to do it.”
Words failed him in Spokane on 9 September, when he found himself the only man in an auditorium full of women. Washington was one of the most advanced of the suffrage states. He could not hide the fact that for most of his life, feminism had passed him by. “My fellow citizens,” he began awkwardly, “this is the first meeting of this kind I have ever addressed.”
A strange muffled noise stopped him. It was the sound of gloved hands clapping. Unsure of how to proceed, he tried, then abandoned, the preachy tone that served him well with male audiences. He praised the Progressive Party for adopting a full suffrage plank, and spoke of his new friendship with Jane Addams. Thanks largely to her, he had become a convert to the cause. “It’s because I’m a natural democrat. I don’t like to associate with people unless they have the same rights I have.”
By now Roosevelt was talking naturally, and his listeners were sympathetic. “I was converted from a passive suffragist to an active suffragist,” he said, “by seeing women who had